Calypso Technology - one of the handful of multi-asset trading platforms for capital markets - has tapped Platform Computing to provide the grid backbone for its Galapagos risk analysis and hedging applications. Unlike other parts of the Calypso trading platform, Galapagos is only being sold as a service, and that means Calypso has to set up a compute and storage grid suitable for scaling up and down dramatically as the markets move up and down around the world.

Mark Hackett, chief executive of Southampton University Hospital NHS Trust, has promised to deal properly with data security after one of his staff lost a laptop computer with 33,000 patients' records on it.

Three years on from its debut, streaming music service Omnifone has gained a toe hold on the desktop, thanks to a major PC deal. HP will bundle its MusicStation service pre-installed in 10 European countries on laptops and desktop PCs.

The British foreign and defence ministers are answering questions posed by all comers in an online forum, where the most popular questions are answered first. Thus far, public interest appears fairly low.

The US Missile Defence Agency has released video of its jumbo-jet-mounted laser cannon - intended to beam down nuclear missiles lifting off from enemy countries - in action, playing its ray on a test rocket off California.

The positioning of the Sony’s Alpha A550 in its DSLR line-up is a bold move. At this price point the company has left off some features that most manufacturers are offering as must-haves, namely, HD Video and customisation of picture profiles. What the A550 has instead are features more suited to still photography, with a continuous shooting at a much higher than average capture rate and shadow detail adjustment by two different means.

Top American boffins have warned that the US government's efforts to prevent global apocalypse caused by meteor strike are inadequate. The scientists add that nuclear weapons are the only practical means of defence against large, planet-wrecker sized asteroids.

The co-founder of a UK postcode lookup service that was forced to shut down after the Royal Mail threatened the website with legal action in October last year, is calling on the developer community to consult with the government on Ordnance Survey mapping data.

Mozilla vice president of engineering Mike Shaver has reiterated that the open source outfit has no intention of rolling the H.264 video codec into its Firefox browser, even though the likes of YouTube and Vimeo are using the patented codec with early versions of their plug-in-free HTML5 video players.

Juniper Networks and Polycom have formed an alliance to sell enterprise telepresence and video conferencing services through third-party providers, in an apparent effort to counter Cisco's recent acquisition of video-conferencing gear maker Tandberg.

Like its peers in the IT market research community, Gartner has been polishing its crystal balls for the past few months, hoping to predict what global IT spending will look like in 2010. The answer is up from 2009's levels, but this may have a lot to do with the currency effects of translating global sales into U.S. dollars. A separate poll by Gartner of chief information officers from around the globe suggests that their IT budgets will be flat.

Apple's hyper-hyped iPad may not be the only thing on Steve Jobs' agenda when he takes the stage this Wednesday at San Francisco's Yerba Buena center. The latest word on the street is that Apple may also announce the end of its US iPhone-exclusivity deal with AT&T.

At least three US oil companies were victims of highly targeted, email-borne attacks designed to siphon valuable data from their corporate networks and send it abroad, according to a published report citing unnamed people and government documents.

For all the talk about how server virtualization's day has finally come for the x64 server platform - and how the economic meltdown has finally given customers the impetus to go virtual with their iron - VMware couldn't grow both sales and profits in the final quarter of 2009.